I need your help! Technoir needs to be play tested by people who aren’t me. To make this process easy, I’m just posting the current draft of the rules publicly on the website for anyone to download—anyone to try.

If you can help out with this process, all you need to do is: play one or more sessions with your group, take notes of what was fun and what wasn’t, and email me with your feedback. Read more »

So here’s one more piece of the puzzle: the Twin Cities Metroplex Transmission. It has Connections you will need for making a protagonist and a bunch of other plot nodes and stat blocks to make sure you have some content for the game.Read more »

In my previous post about hack points, I mentioned a Player’s Guide for Technoir. The Player’s Guide is a 16-page booklet that contains barebones rules for protagonist generation, inflicting Adjectives on other characters, and recovering from those Adjectives. It also has a list of Training Programs, descriptions of the nine Verbs, many Adjective examples, an overview of the favors that Connections can perform, and an Object catalog with a glossary of all the Object tags.

You can likely glean most of how to play the game from this document alone. What it is lacking is information for how everything flows together: how the protagonists, through their Connections, link to the node map and the plot; how the plot nodes relate to each other and how the node map is generated; how inflicting Adjectives can be sequenced into the conflict resolution system; how the Push economy plays. These will all be dealt with in the core book (which is essentially the GM’s guide).Read more »

A few months ago, I posted the first design element of my new game: it’s character sheet. The game didn’t have a title then, but with some help it has since been dubbed Technoir. Much of this game has been designed by the process of creating the character sheet. So, as it has been revised, its evolution is reflected in the changes of the character sheet over the playtesting process.

There are two new pdf files available at the Chronica Feudalisdownloads page.

The first is cf_pregens.pdf. It consists of a collection of pre-generated characters. These are the protagonists that I created for the “Warwick Castle” scenario I ran at Gen Con (it’s also featured at the end of the “Explore” chapter in the core rules of the game). These eight characters are proper starting protagonists, each supplied with personalized aspects and their own particular agenda.

Second is cf_reference.pdf, a fan-submitted reference document supplied by BiggerBoat. It does have the side-effect of taking what I describe as a relatively rules-light system and makes it look like a heavy-weight, but this flow chart is actually a very helpful look at how Chronica Feudalis works. It takes a step-by-step look at the system mechanics and conflict systems that you can use as a primer before the first time you play or keep on hand as a reference throughout your adventures. Take a look.

I think they are perfect for convention games when you don’t know everyone’s name. And having your three, key aspects right on the name sign helps keep them fresh in everyone’s mind for easy tags and compels.

I’ve added this and a few other character sheet options to the downloads page as well.